Last Things: Essays on Ends and Endings

Gavin Hopps is Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews (United Kingdom). His research concentrates on romantic literature and popular music.
Stella Neumann is Professor of English Linguistics at RWTH Aachen (Germany). Her research interests include register variation, empirical methods and translation studies.
Sven Strasen is Senior Lecturer at RWTH Aachen. His research focuses on reception theories and cognitive literary studies.
Peter Wenzel is Professor of English Literature at RWTH Aachen and has published on literary theory.

This multidisciplinary collection brings together scholars from the fields of literature, theology and linguistics who question and extend our taken-for-granted conceptions of The End. It focuses on the ways in which endings are formally signaled in literature, and sets these alongside parallel studies in journalism and film. However, it is also concerned with larger philosophical and historical notions of closure, impermanence, rupture and apocalypse as well as the possibilities of «posthumous» being. It gives examples from fairytales, Byron, Longfellow, Dillard, Barnes and South African writers.

This collection from the fields of literature, theology and corpus linguistics focuses on ways in which endings are formally signaled in literature, journalism and film. It is also concerned with larger philosophical notions of closure and apocalypse. It gives examples from fairytales, Byron, Longfellow, Dillard, Barnes and South African writers.

Contents: Peter Wenzel: Endings in Literature: A Survey - Stella Neumann: Corpus-Linguistic Exploration of Endings in Short Stories - Jennifer Fest: Defining Endings in Newspaper Writing - A Case Study on Football Coverage - Tobias Hock: Film Endings - Julia Vaeßen/Sven Strasen: A History of Anthony in 3 ½ Endings: History, Memory, and Fabulation in Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending - Trevor Hart: Unexpected Endings: Eucatastrophic Consolations in Literature and Theology - Samuel V. Adams: An Anachronic Ending: Time and the Post-Messianic Imagination - Daniel Gabelman: In the Shadow of the End: The Moral of Fairytales - Gavin Hopps: «Serious Laughter»: A Re-Assessment of Byron's Terminal Irony - Timothy E. Bartel: Ending in Peace: The Quest for Final Consolation in Longfellow's Dante Sonnets - Tanya Walker: The Ending Written into Things: Coming to Terms with the Inescapable Ephemerality of Art - Lori Kanitz: Suspended Endings, Theodicean Spaces, and Annie Dillard's Asyndetic Style - Geoffrey V. Davis: «No correct epiphany»: On the Politics of Endings in South African Writing 1948-2000 - Peter H. Marsden: An Untimely Ending: Paying Tribute to Rüdiger Schreyer (1941-2013).